Sweeper: Never Ending Racism

Friday Jan 19th, the Medieval times were discussed with the guest Professor and how it’s represented in Pop-culture today, such as movies, TV Shows, Books and what not, but a major “plot” has been ignored when medieval times are represented, and that is: racism.

Yesterday during the group discussions, a few points have been mentioned about how medieval times are considered (sometimes) to be a great or heroic time for the Europeans, and mostly because it is believed that there were no immigrants, and at the time conquering other parts of the world and the beginning of colonialism were considered to be glorious and important to spread their culture and religion.

Another discussion was held about how Medieval Europeans, who were mostly Christians, were racist towards the Jews and how they were represented in the culture. Jewish men were depicted to be very feminine to a point that many believed that Jewish men menstruated. Racism was so severe that it portrayed the Jews as if they were not even humans, people actually believed they had tails, horns, and big noses.

Then it went from Jews to the indigenous in the “New World”, after that were black people and the slave trade in Europe and North America, then back to Jews during WWII in Nazi Germany, even in Canada where boats full of Jewish refugees were rejected and sent back to Europe.Nowadays it’s islamophobia.

This is important because it shows that with every generation a new “enemy” is created, just because they don’t sound, or look like the dominant race or religion. This (obviously) creates a divide between people, and leads to deaths of millions of innocent citizens that have lead normal lives.